Are Greek IDs safe?

After yesterday's release s GovGR Wallet, those of you who want can obtain . Not that we haven't. At least it's official now.

But let's see if the Greek state finally managed to create secure digital identities (readID) that are read through NFC technology like in the rest of Europe (green on the map below).

fingerprint

Which European countries have ID cards with an NFC chip that ReadID can read? If you live abroad and hold such an ID, it's easy to check if it has an NFC chip: just look for the ICAO chip logo.

icao logo

This logo can also be found on ePassports and indicates that the NFC chip is ICAO 9303 compliant. ICAO 9303 is the UN's international standard for passports and identity cards.

For History:

Identity cards in Europe, specifically in the European Economic Area (EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), the and Switzerland, follow EU standards.

Identity cards are considered travel documents and have a standardized layout, similar to passports.

However, unlike passports, the EU did not mandate the use of ICAO standard 9303 for identity cards until 2019. So there are currently at least 86 different versions of identity cards in circulation in the EU, and some countries issue several non- identity cards. To demonstrate this, the UK has decided to no longer accept EU IDs from 1 October 2021 due to concerns about fake IDs.

However, in August 2019 the EU decided to strengthen and standardize the security features for ID cards in different member states. Regulation (EU) 2019/1157 states that all Member States must follow ICAO 9303 standards when issuing identity cards, which must contain an NFC chip with a face image inside.

Most of the European countries that launched the new ID cards already made sure to have an ICAO-compliant NFC chip, before this new regulation. The new regulation ensures that countries with older and less secure ID cards will have to replace them in the coming years.

Member states therefore had two years (until August 2021) to adopt the regulation and stop issuing insecure identity cards. It should be mentioned here that the regulation does not oblige Member States to issue identity cards to their citizens, but if they do, they should comply.

Which countries have ID cards compatible with ReadID?

As of August 2021, 28 out of 32 countries (EU, UK and Switzerland) had ID cards with an ICAO compliant Machine Readable Zone. Among these 28, 21 also had an ICAO-compliant NFC chip. Identity cards are usually valid for 10 years. Some countries started issuing them 10 years ago, so they have both secure and non-secure versions in circulation. These countries include Spain, Italy, Belgium and Poland.

ReadID works with all ICAO compliant ID cards in Europe. This means that ReadID can read the contactless chip of ID cards from 21 countries, verify their authenticity and check for clones. The map below shows which countries these are:

id cards

Read and Verify (Dark Green): ReadID can read and verify ID cards. All necessary certificates are present by default.

Read-only (light green): ReadID can read the IDs, but the list of country certificates that use it by default does not have the necessary certificates for verification.

No chip (light grey): ID cards do not have a (supported) contactless chip.

No ID (Dark Grey): the country does not issue identity cards.

Increase coverage

Through the aforementioned EU Regulation 2019/1157, the percentage of compliant IDs will increase over time. "Mixed" countries have stopped issuing non-compliant ID cards and expect the old ones to expire in the coming years. Let's mention some of these countries in particular:

Belgium, Cyprus, Spain, France, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Romania, Austria and Germany are the "mixed" countries that have IDs compatible and incompatible with ReadID.

Germany started issuing ICAO-compliant ID cards from 2 August 2021, which can be read and verified by ReadID. Before this, ID cards already had an NFC chip, but it was not compatible with it ICAO 9303. Therefore, ReadID cannot read these older ID cards (yet).

The map has been created with ReadID Analytics which contains anonymous log information used to improve the service.

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Written by giorgos

George still wonders what he's doing here ...

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